Silent Sound
Live music you could hear anywhere in the centre, streamed straight to shoppers’ phones.
- Role
- Concept, visual and UI design
- Deliverables
- Promotional campaign, mobile app UI
- Tools
- Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite
- Client
- Sylvia Park, Auckland, New Zealand
Live music, behind glass
Silent Sound was a holiday entertainment promotion for a major shopping centre in Auckland, New Zealand. Popular New Zealand artists performed live inside a soundproof booth in the centre, and shoppers listened on their own phones, with the music streamed over the centre’s free WiFi.
They could stay and watch the artist perform live, or carry on shopping while still listening.
Concept and visual design
The concept and visual design for the original marketing and promotional material.
Mobile app UI
The phone app UI, built from that same concept in Sketch and Adobe Creative Suite.
What live testing told us
Once the event went live, we were able to test it with real users. Two clear themes came out of the feedback.
Easy to use
Users could interact with the UI easily, and follow through with the key objectives of the journey we’d mapped out for them.
A sense of disconnection
Participants felt a little disconnected from the event. The feeling of connection that comes with live music was lost.
A success on paper, with a lesson in connection
The project delivered on its functional goals: the app UI, the creative design promoting the event, and how it all worked together. Customers liked being able to watch and listen to the band, and to keep shopping while still listening on their phones.
But the UX started from a marketing idea, and that led to the disconnection many participants felt, both the customers and the musicians themselves.
“A big appeal of live music is intimacy, the connection between performer and audience. Physical boundaries between them took that away.”
Looking back, I’d love to explore this experience further, and how we could have improved that part of the journey.
